Topic archives: NHMRC

While the focus now is rightly on the communities at immediate risk from bushfires in New South Wales, those massive clouds of smoke that have hung over Sydney and elsewhere over the past week pose other health risks, say Martine Dennekamp and Fay Johnston from the Centre for Air Quality and Health Research and Evaluation. Their research shows that around 340,000 […]

Crikey journalist Amber Jamieson recently reported that the National Health and Medical Research Council is examining whether anti-wind farm campaigner Sarah Laurie has breached ethical codes of research conduct. The NHMRC and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency were recently sent a dossier raising questions about the work of Laurie, CEO of the Waubra Foundation […]

It’s taken nearly four years, reviews of about 55,000 research publications, and endless meetings, consultations and negotiations. (Plenty of blood, sweat and tears, in other words.) Today the NHMRC finally launched the new Australian Dietary Guidelines and Infant Feeding Guidelines (available here with masses of supporting material). The aim of this post (thrown together in […]

Health and medical research has been at the forefront of many peoples’ minds of late – and not only because of the recent NHMRC grants announcements. Universities Australia and others have been sounding the alarm (see here and here) about the possibility of a funding freeze affecting many research grants. This has been widely foreshadowed […]

Professor Simon Chapman writes: In 2011, the National Health and Medical Research Council published a “rapid review” of the evidence of whether wind farms are harmful to health. The NHMRC concluded that “There are no direct pathological effects from wind farms” and that “low level frequency noise or infrasound emitted by wind turbines is minimal […]

Is there a disconnect between the general focus of health and medical research and population health perspectives? Most people with a concern for population health would surely nominate health inequalities as a critical issue (defined by the WHO as “ differences in health status or in the distribution of health determinants between different population groups”). […]

As you may have heard, drafts of the revised Australian Dietary Guidelines and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating are now available for public comment, with a view to their finalised release next year. Clearly, translating more than 55,000 scientific journal articles into clear, simple messages and advice is no small task. In a nutshell, […]

Update 1 Dec: A response from the NHMRC has been added to the bottom of the post. Note: If you want to comment on the NHMRC’s draft guidelines for identifying and managing conflicts of interest in clinical guideline development (and, as the post below suggests, they do need help) – the deadline is COB this […]

Cries of frustration and anguish, hair-loss, sleepless nights, unattractive bagging under the eyes, and even domestic disharmony. Such problems* are being blamed on gremlins in the NHMRC’s Research Grants Management System (RGMS), which is meant to enable grant applications to be made online but has been having some major problems. Last Friday, NHMRC CEO Warwick […]

As reported in a recent Croakey post, an NHMRC committee is in the process of drafting new dietary guidelines. This is inevitably an incredibly fraught and contested process. There are so many powerful players with an interest in encouraging us to eat more of whatever it is they sell. Often these marketing campaigns are dressed […]